Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz (born December 22, 1970, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is an American Republican politician who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 and began his first term representing Texas in 2013. He unsuccessfully ran for president in 2016. Cruz is known for his conservative views and has a reputation as a firebrand. In 2024 Cruz won reelection over Democratic challenger Colin Allred.

His father, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz, was born in Cuba but fled to the United States in 1957 after being imprisoned by the Fulgencio Batista regime. Ted’s mother, Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson, was a native of Delaware. When he was born in 1970, the family was living in Alberta, Canada, where his parents worked in the oil industry. Because he was born to an American mother in Canada, Cruz became a dual U.S.–Canadian citizen. The family moved to Houston, Texas, in 1974, where he graduated from Second Baptist School and was raised a Southern Baptist. Cruz later attended Princeton University (B.A., 1992), where he studied public policy and joined a debate team, winning the top award in a national debating championship during his senior year. He then enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he graduated in 1995.

Cruz subsequently clerked at the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (1995) and then for William Rehnquist (1996–97), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. After entering private legal practice in 1997, he represented Congressman John Boehner in a lawsuit and did preliminary work for the Republican-led impeachment proceedings against Pres. Bill Clinton. In 1999, having become more active in Republican Party politics, Cruz went to work on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, advising the candidate on matters of law and public policy. He served on Bush’s legal team before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, which resulted in Bush’s election to the presidency. Cruz then worked in the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.

In 2003 Cruz was appointed solicitor general of Texas, becoming, at age 32, the youngest person to hold the post in the United States. He argued before the Supreme Court nine times and earned a reputation as a fiercely effective litigator. Cruz, a strict constructionist, believed that judicial interpretation of the Constitution must be confined to a more or less literal reading of the text. During his five-year tenure as solicitor general, he successfully argued that international treaties are not binding on states until enacted by the U.S. Congress, and he defended the constitutionality of a public monument that featured the Ten Commandments. Cruz returned to private practice in 2008.

In 2012, in his first attempt to win electoral office, he entered the race for the U.S. Senate post vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison. Cruz, who was popular within the Tea Party movement, ran to the right of the favored Republican candidate in the primary and won in a runoff by a significant margin. He then easily defeated his Democratic opponent in the general election. After taking office in 2013, he became a leader of the conservative movement in Congress. He developed a reputation as a firebrand, happy to thwart his party’s leadership as well as combat initiatives of Pres. Barack Obama and Democratic members of Congress. Cruz emerged as a vocal opponent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and in 2013, in an unsuccessful effort to cut off Senate funding of the PPACA, he spoke on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours, part of which time was spent reading Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. The move contributed to the U.S. government shutdown the following month.

In 2014 Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship, and the following year he announced that he was entering the U.S. presidential election race of 2016. Among his earliest acts as a candidate was to say that he would apply for health insurance under the PPACA for himself, his wife (Heidi Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who took unpaid leave during the campaign), and their two children. In 2015 he published a memoir, A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America.

On the campaign trail, Cruz maintained his conservative agenda. A vocal advocate of a smaller federal government, he supported the abolishment of numerous agencies, notably the Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service. He also proposed ending the corporate tax and introducing a flat tax. On social issues, he believed that states should be allowed to decide the issue of same-sex marriage, and he sought to limit access to abortions. Cruz began the primary election season by winning the Iowa caucuses in February 2016, and after March’s Super Tuesday, when primaries and caucuses were held in 11 states, he was second to Donald Trump in number of delegates. As Trump consolidated his lead over the next two months, Cruz sought to gain momentum by announcing in late April that if he became the Republican nominee, Carly Fiorina would be his running mate. However, after a poor showing in the Indiana primary the following week, Cruz suspended his campaign. By this time his relationship with Trump had become particularly contentious, and at one point Trump made the unsubstantiated claim that Cruz’s father was with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the latter assassinated U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1963. However, Cruz later endorsed Trump, who was ultimately elected president.

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Cruz subsequently supported a number of President Trump’s policies, and in 2017 he was involved in crafting major tax-reform legislation. The following year he ran for reelection and faced a surprisingly strong challenge from Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Trump campaigned for Cruz, who narrowly won the hotly contested election. In 2019 the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump over allegations that he withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into opening a corruption investigation into Joe Biden (in 2020 Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee). Cruz vocally defended Trump, and during the Senate trial he hosted a daily podcast about the proceedings. In February 2020 he voted against convicting Trump, and the president was acquitted in a largely party-line vote. Later that year Cruz published One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History.

In the 2020 presidential election Cruz was a vocal supporter of Trump, who ultimately lost to Biden. In the ensuing weeks Cruz advanced Trump’s repeated claims of voter fraud, though numerous court filings failed to provide evidence to support the allegations. During Congress’s certification of the results in January 2021, he was among a group of Republicans who voted to reject electors from several states. The proceedings were interrupted after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, but the challenge to the election ultimately failed. In February 2021 Cruz was photographed at a Houston airport on his way to Cancún, Mexico, during a brutal cold snap that claimed the lives of hundreds of Texans. Cruz drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, and he cut the trip short, saying that it was “obviously a mistake.”